Wheelchair Lift
When our parents died when we were teenagers, I knew I’d have to grow up fast and help take care of my sister, Jess. She’s a quadriplegic and has been in a wheelchair she was born. As her older brother, I’ve always had to look out for her, and I never minded it much because the truth is she looks out for me, too. When I finally got my license, Jess was overjoyed. She said she’d never been anywhere seeing as how she was stuck in that chair, and now she wanted to see the world. I didn’t mind bit my kid sister tagging along with me most places I went. But one thing really bothered me and that was loading and unloading that massive wheelchair of hers. It’s one of those motorize jobs and must weigh about a hundred pounds. Either that or I’m just weak. Anyway, of course I couldn’t say anything to Jess. But I started looking into buying a wheelchair lift right away.
Shopping for a wheelchair lift is like shopping for anything else—you wouldn’t believe how many different models they have! There are basically two type of wheelchair lifts that can be used for you vehicle—an internal wheelchair lift and an external one. An internal wheelchair lift is secured inside the trunk of your vehicle and it slowly hoists the chair into your trunk, while the external models attach to the hitch of your car or truck and lift the chair into the trunk. Because of storage reasons, I decided to go with the internal wheelchair lift.
Jess smiled when she saw her new lift. It turns out she had also been worried about me loading her wheelchair in and out of the van for quite some time.
“That’s sweet,” I said. “But you didn’t have to worry about me.”
“I wasn’t,” she said, and smiled. “I thought you were going to drop my chair.”
We both laughed for a long time. Then we got in the car and went out for a bite to eat. With our new wheelchair lift loading and unloading her chair is a cinch. I can’t believe I spent all that time struggling with it in the past. But hey, that’s what big brothers are for.
